That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.

Pat Barker

All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.

Adam Gopnik

I tore my right shoulder to pieces - three external tears, a labrum tear, and a detachment of the bicep tendon.

Alex O'Loughlin

Genetic theories, I gather, have been cherished academically with detachment.

Allen Tate

It is a sad but undeniable reality that people have died in the line of duty since the earliest days of the United Nations. The first was Ole Bakke, a Norwegian member of the United Nations guard detachment, shot and killed in Palestine in 1948. The toll since then has included colleagues at all levels.

Ban Ki-moon

Obedience is detachment from the self. This is the most radical detachment of all. But what is the self? The self is the principle of reason and responsibility in us. It is the root of freedom, it is what makes us men.

Bede Griffiths

The essence of the Way is detachment.

Bodhidharma

Narcissism is not about self love. It's a clinical trait that belies a deep sense of emptiness, low self-esteem, emotional detachment, self-loathing, extreme problems with intimacy.

Drew Pinsky

I don't come from a famous family and don't have this detachment from everyday people and everyday life. I'm just doing my job and the attention that comes with it is part of the territory.

Ed Westwick

Detachment is what interests me, seeing how people couldn't have been any other way, how they were the product of forces that they had no control over.

Edward St Aubyn

As an Anglo-Indian kid in Bolton, I was basically in a minority of one. That was a source of misery, but at the same time, one of the effects of receiving the message that you don't belong to the club is that you watch the club with detachment. The fact that no one quite knew who I was was a major contributory factor in starting to write.

Glen Duncan

Spending hours stressed out in front of the TV isn't the same as volunteering or donating. Feeling a high level of personal distress makes people feel agitated and emotionally drained, to the point that they lack the energy or detachment to help - or the energy to manage themselves.

Gretchen Rubin

For most people, attaining the intellectual clarity and emotional detachment that investing requires is tough.

Guy Spier

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.

H. P. Lovecraft

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

James Dickey

I think you could argue that President Obama could have watched a little cable news... I do think that there is value in understanding where the conversation is and having a little less detachment where the popular conversation is.

Jeff Zucker

The relevance of Marxism to science is that it removes it from its imagined position of complete detachment and shows it as a part, but a critically important part, of economy and social development.

John Desmond Bernal

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

John Irving

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

John le Carre

What 'Scream' was great at was presenting ironic detachment and then making you actually care about the people that were having it, and juxtaposing it with their situation, all in the service of making a great horror movie. It was fresh.

Joss Whedon

When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed.

Joyce Carol Oates